//------------------------------// // Chapter 13 // Story: Voyage of the Equinox // by Starscribe //------------------------------// Let the program run as long as it takes. 59% It had been almost two weeks. They’d burned through most of their emergency rations, along with their patience. For a prospector, Applejack was none too happy smelling like one. Twilight herself had spent at least a few minutes alone in decompressed rooms, screaming into her suit with the radio deactivated. But then the lights came on. Twilight blinked, stirring only sluggishly in her space suit. Starlight’s voice came next, flat as ever but with more emotion behind it now for Twilight than would’ve been for the reunion of a lover. “Reactor emergency start-up sequence underway. Core temperature at five hundred degrees Celsius and rising. WARNING: Decompression damage detected in OVERFLOW ERROR. Warning, sections HABITATION, BRIDGE, FABRICATION, STORAGE, REACTOR, HYDROPONICS unsafe. Life support cannot be restored until fusion is restored. Please remain in COMPUTER CORE.” Then came the whirring of the air recyclers, which filled the air with misty vapor from every vent as they cleared. Applejack wasn’t far—on the other side of the survival tent, which they’d set up right beside the mainframes like this was some kind of campout. She reached out, settling one hoof on Spike’s shoulder. “No, can’t take that off yet. That’s near to pure C02 as can be belching out right now. You breathe that for a few minutes and I don’t think even Twilight’s magic will do for ‘ya.” Spike groaned, rolling onto his side. “If I have to smell myself for another ten minutes I’m going out an airlock. This better have been worth it, Twi.” “Yeah,” Applejack said. “Yer’ instincts haven’t led us astray so far, unlike mine. But I ain’t takin’ another campin’ trip like this. You can freeze me up with the others instead.” “No need,” Twilight said, though the confidence in her tone was false. If she could only act wise, and actually find the program had done something worthwhile… she could turn their suffering over the last few weeks into a win. “We’ve given it enough time. You can go ahead and do whatever you need to get the Equinox back in working order, Applejack. If our computers aren’t working now, I’ll restore from backup myself.” She rose slowly, stretching her tired limbs one at a time as she made her way past the screens. She kept her eyes on her hooves, not wanting to look at what they contained. If those screens said the Equinox was dead in the water… then only she would be to blame for their deaths. But the recordings are back, and the diagnostics sounded right. Feels like the reactor is going again too. It didn’t seem like their computer was fried, despite how hard it had been working. Guess all those imperial bits really did get put to good use. Crystal tubes might be a thousand times more expensive than magnetic, but they didn’t go out. Twilight could feel Spike and Applejack behind her, though she didn’t actually turn to look. They wanted to see as much as she did. She sat down in front of the screen, pushing the chair back a little to accommodate her suit. The arms were far enough apart that it wasn’t a problem for her, even as an Alicorn. It was a mainframe terminal, utterly unchanged from what she might’ve expected. Twilight ran a jobs report, and saw that background usage had dropped near to its previous level, about 20% of the mainframe’s capacity. Though… that was strange. Available storage. Had dropped from the mind-bending 64mb to 16mb, a number she would’ve expected from a typical university mainframe. She glanced over her shoulder, and sure enough all the tape drives were green. “What is it?” Applejack asked. “Are we bucked or aren’t we?” “I don’t… think we are.” She said, ordering a diagnostic while she flipped over to another terminal and called up the activity log. There was exactly one unready entry on the table, marked with her own credentials. “Fabrication request. One ▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯▯” “Fab request…” Spike muttered, leaning over the arm and pointing with a claw. “What did you order?” “Nothing,” she said. She flipped through a few layers of menus and commands to reach the request, eyes widening as she read it. The order was for an item not found anywhere in their database, though with only a fourth of it connected anymore she couldn’t be sure if it wasn’t one of theirs. Except that it had no name, no attribution, nothing but the template. “I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that before, cap. Print the raw.” Twilight did, and a few seconds later the printer located beside her started to hum. Perforated paper emerged from a slot in the console, and Twilight tore with her magic, offering it to her engineer. “What do you make a’ this, Spike?” He leaned in to look, frowning. “I don’t understand. That’s a lot of silicon, but…” he glanced back at the screen. “That doesn’t look like a gasket. There’s no opening. Boron, phosphorous… is it a bullet?” “No,” Applejack said. “It looks like soup to me. These production instructions look like my sister made ‘em.” She tossed the sheet to one side. “I dunno how this was worth a camping trip, captain.” Twilight leaned closer to the screen, searching it for meaning. The design was made of several constituent parts, and the totality would be impossible for them with their dreadfully low supplies. But it had pieces, and one of which had a flashing asterisk beside it. The computer could build it, if only she put in the order. “We made contact with an alien race,” Twilight said, spinning her chair around to face her crew. “This was the message they sent. It has to be significant.” “Getting our damn prospector back is significant, captain. We’ve already lost time. If they were smart, they could’ve got two good weeks of acceleration on us. We don’t have time for…” she waved a hoof through the air. “I need both of you on deck with me until we catch up.” 1. Shelve the blueprints, catch the Prospector. Applejack’s right, answering academic questions can wait. All crew members devote themselves to catching up with the prospector. 2. Forget the Prospector, build the thing. We had a destination in mind once that would’ve been rich in resources. If we really need a prospector we can build another one. Maybe with the help of alien technology along the way. 3. Archive the blueprint on a backup tape, then purge the computer anyway. Just because it’s working now doesn’t mean there weren’t a thousand undetectable changes that might kill us at any moment. If the Signalers wanted to send a message, they sent it. Now we get our computer back. 4. Have Spike build a section of the blueprint. Applejack and I are more than capable of repairing enough of the Equinox when our plan for recapturing the prospector is mostly magical anyway. Spike could use some more time to heal, and a little hobby project is just the thing. (Certainty 150 required)